Software for exascale computing: Some remarks on the priority program SPPEXA

SPPEXA, the Priority Program 1648 “Software for Exa-scale Computing” of the German Research Foundation (DFG), was established in 2012. SPPEXA was DFG’s first strategic Priority Program—strategic in the sense that it had been the initiative of DFG’s board to suggest a larger and trans-disciplinary funding scheme to support the development of software at all levels that would be able to benefit from future exa-scale systems. A proposal had been formulated by a team of scientists representing domains across the STEM fields, evaluated in the standard format for Priority Programs, and financed via special funds. Operations started in January 2013, and after two 3-year funding phases and a cost-neutral extension, SPPEXA’s activities will come to an end by end of April, 2020. A final international symposium took place on October 21–23, 2019, in Dresden, and this volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering—the second SPPEXA-related one after the corresponding report of Phase 1 (see Appendix 3 in [1])—contains reports of 16 out of 17 SPPEXA projects (the project ExaSolvers will deliver its report as a special issue of Springer’s journal Computing and Visualization in Science) and is, thus, a comprehensive overview of research within SPPEXA. While each single project report emphasizes the respective project’s individual research outcomes and, thus, provides one perspective of research in SPPEXA, this contribution, co-authored by the two scientific coordinators—Hans-Joachim Bungartz and Wolfgang E. Nagel—and by three of the four researchers that have served as program coordinator over the years—Philipp Neumann, Benjamin Uekermann, and Severin Reiz—emphasizes the program SPPEXA itself. It provides an overview of the design and implementation of SPPEXA, it highlights its accompanying and supporting activities (internationalization, in particular with France and Japan; workshops; doctoral retreats; diversity-related measures), and it provides some statistics. It, thus, complements the papers from SPPEXA’s research consortia collected in this volume.